Thursday, April 05, 2018

A while back, I decided to publish the stories I've sold over all of these years as individual e-stories...each selling for 99 cents, or for free if they were short enough. With many of these stories, I've actually made more from selling the e-stories than I initially made selling the first rights to a publisher. As a result of this, I'm going to try something different with my latest story. Instead of trying to sell it to one of the many markets out there, I'm going to post it as a new e-story, and sell it myself.
I'm not sure how this will work, but in this new age of publishing, everything seems to be an experiment anymore...

2 comments:

Just kidding, although I have had a similar experience. I have several stories that sold for under $25 initially, and I've then put up for sale on SmashWords and Amazon, and they all made more money than the original story sale. My collections sold OK for a while, but on a per-story basis they don't do as well as the 99 cent stories.

I have also learned that for a book size collection that charging less than $9.99 yields diminishing returns. A $2.99 book will sell more copies, but you have to sell 4 of them to make more money than a $9.99 book. You have to sell 8 or 9 $1.99 books to make the same as one $9.99 sale. You make more money charging more and selling fewer.

I am tempted to stop subbing because lately there has been a 6 month wait for a response from some of these gofundme anthologies. I have a handful of stories that have been out one place or another for three years. One was accepted, but unpublished and not paid for at a site for four years (they claim they're working on it). The trouble is that when I see that 6, 8 or 10 cents a word little dollar signs appear in my eyes and I pull the trigger.

Now that I am retired I've been finishing some short stories but don't bother subbing after rejections from the fast pro sites. I need to start converting to mobi and epub.

BTW, I used Barnes and Noble publishing to create a hard cover book. It is wonderful to hold a real book with a dust jacket, color illustrations, and your name on it, but I don't think I'll ever sell any at $15 a pop.